Tired of your Wi-Fi cutting out every time you take your laptop into the bathroom with you? IEEE (also known as the Institute of electronics geeks) has just released a new, official standard for 802.22 Wi-Fi, and this bad boy can cover 12,000 square miles with just one single base station.

You should already be familiar with 802.11 a/b/g/n, which is likely the wireless standard that you currently use to connect to the Internet. 802.11 is doing perfectly fine, and there's no need to worry that this new standard is going to immediately render your router useless. 802.22, besides being a solid 0.11 more awesome (for whatever that's worth) is designed to take advantage of all that new broadcast spectrum that opened up when we put the smackdown on analog TVs a couple years ago.

The spectrum that 802.22 will operate in ranges from 54MHz to 698MHz, and the reason that TVs were already in that niche was because these frequencies are great for long distance transmissions. This means that the new Wi-Fi standard will be able to broacast data at up to 22 Mbps out to a whopping 62 miles from just one single base station, making it easy to provide rural broadband or to blanket cities with municipal Wi-Fi.

Now that the official standard has been approved, companies can go start building things that incorporate 802.22 technology, so it's really just a matter of time before none of us are without Wi-Fi access ever again. Phew.

this sounds cool and all but seems like the "wireless router" or whatever device they plan on using would be owned or operated by your ISP and not available to the consumer. Any idea how that part of it will work ?

I'm curious how the reverse direction would occur. The standard can transmit up to 62 miles but it seems like both ends would have to be capable of transmitting at the same power levels to talk to each other (otherwise the transmitter would just be one way). A 5 watt transmitter can only push a signal about 5 miles on flat terrain.